phenomenology

I cannot stand to see this done badly. It is personal. I’m a schoolboy with a crush. I look at my hands and wonder what’s there. Everything is ephemera. My head hurts. So far, with my life, I have done much about nothing. Better than the other way. Such is the fruit of fear. Here it is, clearer: I dreamed that I was walking on a footbridge, over a murky stream. But really I am not exactly exactly in the dream, but looking at myself in the dream, on the footbridge over the muddy water, and I am both alone and with my friend, and it is the rich, melodic atmosphere of companionship, where neither party has another place to be nor a desire to part. Hours upon hours of time goes and goes. It is the phenomenon of always already dying, of perpetually meeting the end of every singular experience, looking at it, and forgetting it. It is that there is nothing better to do than live out this dream, and at any cost. That everything else we do is a violation. And feeling that violation every day, when we wake up, and hurry to our duties, and accept that as fate, is melancholia. And refusing those duties is delusion. And rearranging all the furniture so as to dampen the clatter of delusion and melancholia in the house, is anxiety. And if you find a way to settle the anxiety and, oh my, the melancholy, you are now only deluded. Congratulations. You are simply refusing. You lie in bed for hours with your pages, which keep coming. In the dream I ask my friend if this is what menopause is like—the unbridled psychic bliss that some older women have promised me. Between the spells of your skin feeling nearly on fire and your vagina drying up and your chin sprouting the longest and thickest of tendrils, is this what it is to finally accept your role as your own companion? Is this why older men so often want to date much younger women? Not because younger women are more desirable—there is obviously no true universal desire—but because we are more available? Is this the greatest way any young woman betrays herself, no matter her sexuality, being so unfailingly available to play companion in the dreams of others? We graduate, then, into our freedom. We stop caring if we’re getting the part right. We start writing. I keep trying to cheat my way to this promise. I’ve read ahead. I shut my eyes. I try to prepare for my situation.